Paul Martin was fired from his role as USAID Inspector General after he published a report warning that the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle USAID placed more than $480 million in food and other commodities in danger of spoilage or theft. Martin joins us to recount the chaotic few months leading up to his termination from USAID and how his firing fits into a broader assault on independent government oversight and Constitutional checks and balances that are essential to American democracy.

Martin served as Inspector General for USAID from January 2024 through February 11, 2025. He previously served for fourteen years as Inspector General for NASA and Vice Chair of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. He received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Penn State, where he was part of The Daily Collegian, and a law degree from Georgetown Law. 

His lecture, which also features former U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent, is available on the McCourtney Institute's YouTube channel.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We bring you a special crossover episode with Disorder, a show that explores the fundamental principles lurking behind today's most pressing global issues. Jenna Spinelle talks with Disorder host Jason Pack, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and author of Libya and the Enduring Global Disorder. They discuss the state of democracy around the world and why making America's government more like a European country might not be the solution to polarization that some democracy reformers hope it will be. 

Listen to Disorder

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode is a collaboration with our colleagues at News Over Noise, the podcast from Penn State's News Literacy Initiative. We recorded this interview on October 27, the first day of U.S. Media Literacy Week, an event that highlights the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country.

The conversation focuses on how AI complicates and already-complicated news literacy landscape. With so many news outlets and journalists striking out on their own as content creators, it can feel overwhelming to keep up with the news each day without the added complication of having to question whether what you're seeing is real or computer-generated "AI slop." Despite those challenges, our guests are confident that each of us has the skills and ability to separate factual information from AI slop and make good decisions about how we consume the news.

You'll hear from Democracy Works host Jenna Spinelle, News Over Noise host Cory Barker, and the following guests:

• Pam Brunskill, News Literacy Project
• Sean Marcus, Poynter Institute/MediaWise
• Jenna Meleedy, National Association of Media Literacy Educators

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Civic education is full of nostalgia. Horace Mann, John Dewey, and the Cold War era often come up in conversations about the current state of affairs. Judge Marjorie Rendell knows this well because she grew up in the postwar era and understand how different today's civic education is from what she received as a young student. She saw it firsthand when she visited classrooms across Pennsylvania during her eight years as the state's First Lady and decided to do something about it when she left the role.

Today, the Rendell Center for Civics and Civic Engagement conducts mock trials, read-alouds, and other activities designed to transform civic education from something dry and boring into something exciting for elementary and middle school students. The center also has an eye to the future and are exploring how graphic novels and AI can help their work moving forward. 

Rendell joins us to talk about the center's work and her current role as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. We discuss what it's like to be a federal judge in the current political climate ,and the role that judges and lawyers can play in helping students learn about the Constitution.

The Rendell Center for Civics and Civic Engagement received the McCourtney Institute for Democracy's 2025 Brown Democracy Medal.  

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The movement to end gerrymandering is something we've covered on the show several times over the years. Until recently, the conversation focused on independent redistricting commissions formed as a result of grassroots action from voters who felt that gerrymandering led to elected officials who didn't represent the values of the communities they served. 

The issue is now decidedly more partisan thanks to efforts to redraw maps to benefit Republicans in Texas and Democrats in California — even as majorities of voters across the political spectrum continue to come down against partisan gerrymandering.

What's a nonpartisan reformer to do in this new reality? We spoke with two people who recently won victories to create fairer maps in their states. Carol Kuniholm is the co-founder and chair of Fair Districts PA, which won a court case to redraw Pennsylvania's maps in 2021 and is pushing for the creation of an independent redistricting commission in the Keystone State. Emma Addams is co-executive director of Mormon Women for Ethical Government, which was part of a coalition that filed a complaint that led to a Utah court striking down the state's congressional map in August 2025. 

Kuniholm and Addams discuss how they created the coalitions necessary to create change, the peril that comes with making redistricting a partisan issue, and why the efforts in Texas and California might not work out the way the parties expect.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The last time Cynthia Miller-Idriss was on the show, we discussed how political extremism was making its way to the mainstream through a variety of channels. This time, we're looking at how misogyny and gender-based violence have become mainstream and the implications for our democracy. 

Miller-Idriss write about this trend in her new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism. The book draws from her work studying political violence and extremism, but also from her experience as a female public figure who regularly receives death threats and misogynistic comments directed at her. We talk about both in the interview, as well as organizations that are working to address the crises among American men and boys. 

For those local to Penn State, Miller-Idriss will present a lecture on Man Up and sign copies of the book on Thursday, October 23 at 6:30 p.m. in 114 Welch Building. The event is free and open to the public.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Summer is typically a quiet time for higher education but this summer has been anything but quiet amid funding cuts, lawsuits, and questions about the value of American colleges and universities.

Our guests this week are part of Stand Together for Higher Ed, a new nonpartisan movement of university faculty and staff focused on building collective power to uphold the core values of higher education. Kathy Roberts Forde is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mark Pachucki is associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-author of the university's Mutual Defense Academic Compact (MDAC) resolution. 

Ford, Pachucki, and their Stand Together for Higher Ed colleagues spent the summer talking to faculty and staff from universities across the country about what they can do to defend their institutions amid ongoing attacks and threats from the federal government. They don't have a quick, easy answer but they do have a plan for how people across campuses come together to share how higher education impacts our everyday lives.

Is this approach enough? Chris Beem and Candis Watts Smith disagree on the value of Stand Together's approach and discuss their differences at the end of the episode.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For our final episode of the season, we present a conversation with Ben Rhodes recorded at in Washington, D.C. at the end of May. Democracy Works is going on summer break. We'll be back with new episodes in September!

The Democracy Group's first live podcast recording featuring foreign policy expert and fellow podcaster Ben Rhodes  in conversation with Kamy Akhavan of Let's Find Common Ground and Stephanie Gerber Wilson of Freedom Over Fascism about America’s place on the world stage and how the health of American democracy impacts other democracies around the world. They also discuss how podcasting can shape messaging and narrative in a fractured media environment. 

About Ben Rhodes

Rhodes is a writer, political commentator, and national security analyst. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, and The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. He is currently co-host of Pod Save the World. His work has also been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Foreign Affairs.  

From 2009-2017, Rhodes served as a speechwriter and Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama. In that role, he led the secret negotiations with the Cuban government that resulted in the effort to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba.

To learn more about each of the featured podcasts, visit the Shows page at democracygroup.org/shows.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In a rebroadcast from 2023,  we discuss how to meet the demands that democracy places on us without sacrificing our own personal mental health in the process. 

Many of us can conjure moments when politics made us feel sad. But how often do those feelings translate into more serious forms of depression or other mental health issues? And if politics does make us depressed, what do we do about it? Christopher Ojeda has spent the past few years exploring these questions and joins us this week to talk about the relationship between depression and democracy. 

Ojeda is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California Merced and author of the forthcoming book The Sad Citizen: How Politics Is Depressing and Why It Matters, which will be released in June from the University of Chicago press. He visited Penn State in 2023 to give us an early glimpse of this important work on the relationship between democratic engagement and individual mental health. We discuss how to meet the demands that democracy places on us without sacrificing our mental health in the process.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jeff Sharlet has spent the past few years embedded in the deepest corners of the growing far-right movement in the United States. He's come to think of it as a black hole, something that can pull people in with ever-shifting grievances and a desire for power. He chronicles the movement and the characters in it in his book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War and joins us to discuss the book and how he's thinking about its thesis in the context of the new Trump administration. 

We also discuss some of Sharlet's more recent reporting on war churches in Idaho and Washington, and how things that were on the fringes of the movement five years ago are now squarely in the mainstream.

Sharlet is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing and Director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is also the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, which was adapted into a Netflix documentary series, and This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers.

His reporting on LGBTQI+ rights around the world has received the National Magazine Award, the Molly Ivins Prize, and Outright International’s Outspoken Award. His writing and photography have appeared in many publications, including Vanity Fair, for which he is a contributing editor; The New York Times Magazine; GQ; Esquire; Harper’s Weekly; and VQR, for which he is an editor at large.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.